Yesterday, one of my fellow reporters asked me if I saw Monday’s Columbus Dispatch. I don’t normally read the Dispatch, favoring the Beacon and the PD for my Ohio news.

She told me to check it out the story about a stripper. So, rather than walk all the way across the newsroom to find the paper, I just did a quick search. The first things I found were a couple letters to the editor condemning the paper. That got my curiousity.

So, when I found the story, I read it.

It took me to about the fifth paragraph to understand why the other reporter wanted me to see this story. Although she took it as offensive, I wouldn’t say it was offensive so much as uncalled for, seriously unnecessary. I mean, and I hate to say it because I do respect the Dispatch, but I don’t think this description has a place in any newspaper:

She twirls her fit, 22-year-old body around gold poles, her breasts enhanced and exposed, so that men will slide dollar bills into the thin, white thong stretched across her slender, tan hips.

There are other similar examples in the story where I cringed at the inclusion of details far from necessary to help me understand her plight.

But one thing I noticed, because I didn’t just read the lede and first few paragraphs like my co-worker, is as I told her, “At least there’s a news peg.” She hadn’t noticed. Probably because this “nut graph” is buried about eight or nine long paragraphs down:

Dunn and other strip-club dancers — often used to hiding what they do from people outside club doors — have made recent headlines for teaming to fight legislation they say would have put them out of jobs.

As originally proposed, the measure would have created a 6-foot “no-touch” bubble around dancers — effectively shutting down strip clubs, some maintained.

The legislation that eventually passed prevents dancers from touching patrons — or patrons from touching them — while the dancers are nude or seminude.

Even the watered-down version, expected to take effect by mid-August, still concerns club owners and dancers, who doubt its constitutionality.

Although they have many questions about the new restrictions, the most important one is this: Will they scare off patrons?

All right. I was at least relieved to see the news peg. But as I continued to read the story — all 1,600+ words of it — I found myself not just cringing at those borderline pornographic details and descriptions, but also at the girl herself. I know women who are strippers. Personally. They are fine mothers and friends. They do their job and it is what it is. So I’m not in anyway condoning the profession. It is a way to make a lot of money for those with the right personality and body type. And, like I said, it is what it is.

But this story, except for the paragraphs I pulled out above, is just the girl’s soap box about how hard her life is, how she’s working for a better life, how she paid for her sister’s braces and bought a house in the suburbs, how she reads inspirational books, how nobody thinks you can do anything if you’re a stripper and how there’s more to it than taking off your clothes. OK. I get it. I get it.

But what I don’t get is why this story ran on the front page of a major U.S. daily? I didn’t see the story in print, but apparently it was front and an entire inside page. Precious real estate.

Maybe I was just annoyed by this because I hold newspaper’s to a higher standard. All week, I’ve been subjected to the torture of seeing Paris Hilton be the top TV news story, and was relieved it wasn’t so in print. But ah las, is the hard knock life of a stripper worth so much space? Especially when the “news” angle is apparently only worth about four of those inches? I don’t know. Obviously, the Dispatch editors thought so.

I think there could have been and, if you were going to do this story and run it where and how long they did, should have been so much more. How many people in Ohio would be affected by this law? How many people work as strippers, as bouncers, as bar tenders, and how many patronize the clubs? What about the legislators. What prompted this law? What do they have to say? What about strippers who have had patrons go to far, who haven’t had such a good experience and who might welcome tightening restrictions? Maybe they’ve been reporting on this law for awhile… but I, not following the Ohio legislature or the plight of strippers, could have used some more context.

That’s my two cents.

“Everything we do affects other people.”
— Luke Ford

This past week has been interesting. Stressful at times, several times, and awesome at others. And I can hardly believe it was a single week at all, as the amount of “stuff” packed in makes it seem like a month at least.

The biggest of the “stuff” is that I moved into a new apartment in Lafayette, about a half mile away from the J&C. (I had been living with students in West Lafayette since I moved here. That was a bad idea on my part.) That’s where I’ve been most of the week, first desparately trying to find an apartment I didn’t hate — I am apparently very picky because every place I looked at had some deal-breaker — and then packing and actually moving my stuff across the river. It probably would have been easier to, uh, take a day off work or enlist the help of friends, but I decided to take the project on myself, waking up early and staying up until the wee hours of the morning.

Though I now need more furniture because my apartment is huge and most of what furniture I did have stayed in Akron because I was subleasing a room down here, I am moved. I never again have to come home from work after 10 hours to a house full of strangers playing beer pong or wake up at 3 a.m. to sirens because my roommate or her friend had to be rushed to the hospital with alcohol poisoning. The sad thing is, both of those situations happened on more than one occasion and are merely the tip of the iceberg, hence my eagerness to find an apartment far away from Purdue.

On the downside, I haven’t yet set up Internet at my new place. So, uh, I’m at Panera right now taking advantage of the free wi-fi and trying to remember where I saved that map I made of free wi-fi in Greater Lafayette region.

Since I don’t access the blog from work, updates will probably be infrequent this week until everything is squared away at home. ‘Til then, here’s a sampling of things I’m looking at, reading or thinking about:

• 10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head, especially this point:
  

  Okay, here comes the big one: THE GLASS IS HALF FULL. There is excellent work being done in the new world of online journalism and it’s being done at newspapers like the Washington Post and the Lawrence Journal-World and the San Jose Mercury News and the St. Petersburg Times and the Bakersfield Californian and all sorts of papers of all sizes. You don’t need millions of dollars or HD cameras or years of training to make it happen; all you need is the right frame of mind. So let’s stop writing and groaning about how things used to be different, and let’s start building our own piece of the new world of newspapers brick by brick, story by story.

• A confusing time to be a young journalist… An interesting read, including or perhaps especially the comments at the end. This reflection from Kathleen Nye Flynn, 25, reporter, Los Angeles Downtown News struck a chord with me:
  

  “I have wanted to be a newspaper journalist since I was 12 — my goal has never wavered — and ever since then I have worked for some sort of publication. Now I am a reporter for a local paper, paying my dues quietly while others my age have zoomed to the top. It’s worth it, I tell myself, because, after all, I’m in this for the long haul.

  “Now, they tell me, it looks like there won’t be a long haul — newspapers are dying, and the LA Times, every little local journalist’s paper to aspire to, is shedding all the reporters that I have waited for so long to work with. Well, hell. If only I could tell my 12-year-old self to go into advertising, right?

  “But I hold out hope — I have to. Try to tell me that journalism is a thing of the past, that now bloggers do it for free and I’ll never make enough money to support my future family, that if I do end up working for a big-boy paper one day I’ll just be spewing corporate jargon a la Fox News — and I won’t believe you.

  “I can’t. Call me blind or stupid, but I can’t give up on something that I have so much invested in. At 12-years-old, I wanted to be a journalist so I could dig up the facts, spread the word and effect some sort of change. So, as long as there are facts to dig, people to tell, and words to use, I have a purpose.

  “Whether or not I will have a paycheck, I’ll have to see.”

• My Times — So I’m not sure if it’ll work for any of you, but I received an e-mail Friday telling me to personalize my My Times homepage. This is basically like the Google personalized homepage only not. It’s like, all the news that’s fit to print and then much of everything else I need to know from the mainstream media (including WSJ, BBC, Washington Post, etc. headlines.) Seriously, I’m not sure how I lucked into being one of the beta testers. I figured the service had gone “live” when I got my e-mail, but apparently not everybody’s feeling the love from the NYTimes just yet. Sign up to be notified when it launches, because apparently, that’s how I got included in this round of beta testing.
• One Last Summer — The J&C’s newest community blogger. A senior who just graduated from one of the county high school’s and is headed to Notre Dame this fall where she plans to major in … journalism. She’ll spend the last summer at home blogging about the time between high school and college. Her first post talks about the ridiculous number of graduation parties she attended — 23 last weekend! and more this and the next few — and getting her wisdom teeth pulled. This is a great example of having someone in the community tell their story as a snapshot of a time in life. I’m looking forward to reading it this summer.
• Multimedia Reporter — Speaking of new blogs, this is a few weeks old and has been in my RSS reader since I first stumbled on it. I admire any reporter/editor/journalist/anyone willing to take a leap of faith and build their wings on the way down, as it were. Ron Sylvester is not only building his wings as a long-time newspaper reporting jumping into new media, he’s letting us all in on the ride.